Cartel (25 page)

Jones reached for his briefcase on the floor and slipped out an iPad. "You thought right. Where is the phone now?"

"Laredo, Texas."

"Specifically."

"Uh...hold on a sec." After a pause, during which Jones activated his iPad and started a GPS tracking application, the liaison continued. "Headed north on state highway 1472, approaching Las Cruces Drive. But moving slowly with sev-eral stops. Looks like he's on a bus."

"Send it to me."

"Just did. You should get it-"

"Got it," Jones said as soon as he saw the blip on his screen. "Keep me looped in. I'll let you know when I have them."

"Glad to help an old-"

Jones hung up.

"You got a fix on them?" Gavin asked.

Jones studied the map on his iPad for a few seconds. "Take thirty-five north to San Dario Avenue. They're on a city bus."

Gavin stomped the gas and cut into the far right lane. A sign said that I-35 was three-quarters of a mile ahead. "A city bus?"

"That's what the man said."

"What kind of covert operator takes a bus?"

"The kind who keeps getting away from us," Jones said.

* * * *

Holy Ghost School educated girls from ages five through seventeen. Even though professional teachers now taught most of the classes, nuns from the Society of Saint Teresa of Jesus still ran the school. Father Rodrigo knew the mother superior, a fierce woman in her seventies who still managed to strike a hint of fear into Rodrigo's heart, despite his clerical collar.

The school spanned an entire city block and was sur-rounded by a tall iron fence topped with razor wire. Heavy gates stood at either end of the U-shaped driveway. The gates were only opened mornings and afternoons, when the girls came to school and when they left. During classes, the school was on permanent lockdown, with armed guards pa-trolling the hallways and grounds.

It was just before the dismissal bell when Rodrigo ap-proached the school. Both gates were open and a long line of cars stretched into the street, waiting on the students to swarm out of the building as soon as the bell sounded. Driv-ing past the line of waiting cars, Rodrigo noted that many of them were European-Mercedes, BMW, Audi, Volvo, even a Maserati and a Bentley-and that chauffeurs were behind the wheels of most of them. Some of the cars even bore sub-tle signs of having been armored.

Holy Ghost was a good school, probably the best in Nuevo Laredo, and it was expensive. Benetta could never have afforded the tuition on a policia salary, but Rodrigo had talked the mother superior into granting a substantial discount for Rosalita.

At the entrance, Rodrigo thought there was just enough room for him to squeeze his truck between the waiting cars and the gate's left stanchion. This was an emergency. But his depth perception turned out to be off by a few inches, and the iron post tore the cracked mirror off the driver's side door. He kept going, creeping up the driveway toward the front of the school, hearing the other drivers shouting at him.

Then he noticed something that seemed out of place, two Cadillac Escalades idling at the bottom of the U, next to the portico, under which there appeared to be some kind of disturbance going on. Rodrigo drove to the front of the line and jerked the truck to a stop when he got close enough to see what was happening. Four men with M-16 assault rifles were backing away from the school's main door. One of them was also carrying a kicking, squirming, screaming bundle under his arm. The bundle was dressed in a school uniform skirt and blouse, with high socks and blue and white leather shoes. The bundle had long black hair.

Rosalita.

A trio of nuns followed the kidnappers, their hands raised in supplication and no doubt begging the gunmen not to take the little girl. The men ignored them.

One of the gunmen stopped and aimed his rifle at a fat security guard who stood on the concrete apron under the portico. In response to a command from the gunman, the ter-rified guard plucked his revolver from its holster and dropped it. The steel made a loud clank as it hit the concrete. The gunman smiled and the security guard seemed to relax. Then the gunman shot the guard in the chest with a short burst from his M-16. The crack of the high-velocity shots echoed down the driveway as the blast drove the guard backward and then dumped him in a heap on the concrete just a few feet from his discarded revolver.

The nuns screamed and crossed themselves. One knelt beside the dying guard. Rodrigo crossed himself too and sent a quick prayer up to God asking him to bless the security guard's soul and to look after his family.

Some of the drivers waiting to pick up students sprang out of their cars in panic and ran. Rodrigo stayed in his truck, sitting motionless behind the steering wheel and wait-ing as the gunmen strolled back to their SUVs. The man car-rying Rosalita tossed her into the back seat of the lead Cadil-lac and climbed in after her. A second man got into the front passenger seat, and the other two gunmen climbed into the second SUV. Then the two vehicles raced to the end of the driveway and sped away.

Rodrigo stepped on the clutch and pulled the shift lever on the steering column down into first gear. For just a sec-ond he looked at the nuns, all three of them now huddled around the guard's body, their habits stained with his blood. Then Rodrigo popped the clutch and mashed the gas pedal to the floor.

Scott and Benny stepped down from the city bus into a derelict neighborhood in northwest Laredo. Beater cars lined the streets and local punks stood in clusters, most of them looking like they were still wearing their pajamas, doing a lot of nothing except smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. And eyefucking the newcomers.

Across the street from the bus stop Scott saw a Section Eight apartment complex where he and his team had execut-ed a series of search warrants during his second month as resident agent in charge. They had pulled out five kilos of cocaine, three pounds of meth, two AK-47s that had been converted to fully automatic, arrested nine people, and seized $22,000 in cash. Garza was the case agent and Kat had made some of the undercover buys that led to the search warrants. It was a good case and convinced Scott that he had done the right thing transferring down to the border. This was the front line of the War on Drugs. This was where he belonged.

Except now everything was different. Scott had seen the video. He had peeked behind the curtain and knew that a U.S. official had made a deal with the Sinaloa cartel and was actively helping the cartel smuggle tons of illegal drugs into the United States. How much of the cocaine and meth that his team had seized in that apartment complex been sanctioned by elements within his own government?

And now that he knew, what was he supposed to do with that information? As a frontline soldier in this so-called war, what was he really fighting for? What had his fellow agents died for? Was it nothing more than a holding action, like the last years of Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan, places where thousands of American troops had continued to fight and die long after the politicians had given up?

A train whistle blew in the distance.

"We need to go," Benny said.

Scott realized he had been staring at the apartment block across the street in a kind of nostalgic daze. He smiled at Benny. "I'm waiting on you."

She smiled back and led the way down the sidewalk.

The local shitheads gave them some hostile stares, but Scott and Benny ignored them.

After a couple of blocks, Scott said, "You still haven't told me how we're going to get across the border."

"Only because I didn't want to scare you."

He laughed. "Too late for that."

The train whistle blew again. This time closer.

"How do you feel about trains?" Benny asked.

"I've never actually ridden a train. Why?"

Benny turned right at the next corner.

* * * *

Gavin raced the Suburban north on Highway 1472, zig-zagging between cars, even once passing on the shoulder when he got jammed up behind two slow-movers.

"Next right," Jones said, staring down at the GPS track-ing app on his iPad. "We're less than two miles from them."

After banging a hard right, Gavin slowed. The sudden change of speed made Jones glance up from his screen. "Why are you slowing down?"

"We're in a neighborhood."

"The targets are a mile away."

"And we'll never make it if we crash."

Jones looked back down at the screen. "Take the third left."

The neighborhood they were in may as well have been on the other side of the border. There wasn't one sign written in English, and Mexican gangbangers were hanging on every corner. Half of them had no shirts, most of the other half wore tank-top undershirts, what the trailer park set called "wife beaters." All of them showing lots of ink, their hands holding nothing but cigarettes and quart-sized bottles of beer. Gavin had never used drugs, not even marijuana, and didn't know much about them, but he suspected that some of the cigarettes he saw these punks sucking on probably weren't packed with tobacco. He also knew that this wasn't America anymore, at least not the America he had grown up in.

"Left, left, left!" Jones shouted, jabbing his finger at a fast-approaching side street.

Gavin jerked the wheel hard over. The tires squealed and the centrifugal force tossed them to the right as the Sub-urban slid through the turn.

"What were you doing," Jones snapped as soon as they were back on course, "taking a nap?"

Gavin stared at him. He was getting tired of this pencil-necked spook. "I made the turn, didn't I?"

"Watch the road," Jones said. Then he turned back to his iPad screen. "We're only half a mile from them."

Gavin kept driving.

* * * *

Benny dropped to her hands and knees and crawled through a hole in a rusted chain-link fence behind an aban-doned furniture store. Scott had to take off the straw hat he had appropriated from the man in the hotel and get down on his belly to squeeze through.

Two teenaged boys sat on the loading dock at the back of the store, their feet dangling over the ledge as they shared a joint. Scott could smell the burning marijuana. The boys eyeballed them but didn't say or do anything. Just kept hit-ting the joint and passing it back and forth.

The loading dock was covered in graffiti, most of it in Spanish, a lot of it gang related. The concrete apron behind the store was cracked and sprouted weeds.

Scott followed Benny toward the rear of the property, away from the old store, to where a set of train tracks ran, twenty yards beyond the edge of the concrete. Out there the grass was waist high. "Where are we going?" Scott said. Then he heard the train whistle again. This time much closer.

"To Mexico," Benny said.

They stood in the weeds, ten feet from the tracks. Scott could see a freight train rumbling toward them from the right. He pulled the brim of the straw hat down even lower across his eyes. "They're going see us."

"It doesn't matter," Benny said.

"Why not?"

"People jump on and off the trains all the time. It's a cheap way to get across town."

"I didn't know that."

"That's because you have a nice truck."

"But if the engineer sees us, won't he call somebody?"

"Who?"

"I don't know," Scott said. "The railroad police maybe."

"He's not going to call anybody," Benny said. "The train company doesn't want him to stop the train. They have a schedule to keep. And even if they did stop it, everybody would jump off and run. If you want to worry about some-thing, worry about falling and getting crushed under the wheels, or worry about getting robbed as soon as we get onboard."

Gavin pushed the Suburban down a cracked and potholed side street. They were moving fast, trying to close the gap with Greene and the Mexican cop.

"Two hundred feet," Jones said as he looked up from his iPad and scanned the street ahead. They were driving through a rundown industrial zone, mostly defunct now, empty of people and traffic. They shot through a cross street and were halfway down the next block when Jones snapped, "Here, stop right here."

Gavin stepped on the brakes and skidded the Suburban to a stop next to a half-demolished sign hanging between two rusted posts. The posts stood in front of a wide, low-slung building with a façade of plate glass windows, most of them busted. At one time it must have been a showroom of some kind.

Jones jabbed a finger at the ruined building. "There."

"Inside?" Gavin asked.

After a glance down at his iPad, Jones looked back up at the dilapidated hulk. "Behind it."

In the next block, a freight train rumbled past.

* * * *

As the train rolled and clanked its way past Scott and Benny, the engineer stared at them through an open side window. His arm was propped on the windowsill but he did-n't wave. He didn't smile or frown or change his expression in any way. He just stared at them. The way he might have stared as he passed a couple of cows.

"He was looking right at us," Scott said. "He knows we're going to hop the train."

"Of course he knows," Benny said. "But he doesn't care. He just wants to get wherever he's going on time. Or close enough so he doesn't get fired."

The train was a combination of boxcars and flats, rat-tling past them at less than twenty miles an hour. The sides of nearly all the boxcars were splattered with graffiti. Most of the flatcars were carrying steel shipping containers, whose sides were also tagged with spray paint. The rest of the flatcars were loaded with heavy machinery covered with tar-paulins.

To Scott, the flatcars looked almost impossible to climb onto while the train was moving. There was nothing to grab. The boxcars, at least, had steel steps and ladders mounted to them front and back. "Have you done this before?" he asked.

"Lots of times."

"Any tips?"

She turned to him and smiled. "Don't let go."

Scott edged closer to the tracks. He heard shouting be-hind them and turned around, his hand reaching for the pis-tol tucked into the small of his back. The teenagers who'd been passing the joint were running away from two men in suits standing on the loading dock. The fake State Department clowns who'd mugged Scott outside the DEA office and stolen his prisoner. Jones and...whatever the hell the other guy called himself. Probably Smith.